Year 2010 will be remembered in the computer industry as the time when six-core processors entered the desktop segment. Intel was the first one to announce their six-core solution – a 999-dollar Nehalem modification featuring more computational cores and manufactured with 32 nm technological process.

Gaming Performance

Many modern games can make good use of dual-core CPUs. Some of them can effectively use four CPU cores, too. But they don’t seem to be able to fully load the six-core Gulftown, let alone with Hyper-Threading technology turned on. This explains the small difference between the Core i7-980X and the Core i7-975. The large 12MB L3 cache has a bigger effect on gaming applications. It is thanks to this factor that Intel’s new CPU can appeal to gamers.

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage can load any number of CPU cores. Therefore, the Core i7-980X delivers its very best here. It looks like from now on, new world records in this benchmarking suite are going to be set by computers with this CPU.